Real police work, where it's needed the most

CORPUS CHRISTI - If you’re like most people, me included, you probably have more interaction with other road users than with armed robbers, dope dealers and cartel soldiers.

The roads are where our lives and risk intersect the most. I’ve been in at least six vehicle-on-vehicle crashes as a passenger or driver and two as a bicyclist. Note the semantic significance of “on.” Also note that six plus two equals eight more times than I’ve been shot.

Taking into account miles ridden, driven and pedaled, I don’t think I’m particularly crash-prone. I’m like most people — a stranger to gun violence but an everyday witness to criminally aggressive or negligent encroachments on my and other road users’ right to a reasonable safety buffer. Like combat casualties relative to bullets fired, it’s a wonder there isn’t more street carnage.

It only stands to reason, then, that our police department would want to elevate traffic control as a priority, which it has done since Chief Floyd Simpson was hired about a year ago. There’s nothing Barney Fife and everything Marshal Dillon about this commitment. In answer to the question violators like to ask the officers who ticket them: No, they have NOTHING better to do. Because every driver who sees them doing it instantly becomes a better driver.

Lately traffic control has been impressively, satisfyingly Colombo-esque in fitting little pieces found at hit-and-run crime scenes to perpetrators’ vehicles. Police did this successfully in two recent attention-getting cases, one involving a pedestrian victim and the other a cyclist.

The cyclist, lawyer Richard Leshin, just so happened to have helped the city draft its safe passage ordinance requiring motor vehicles to stay at least three feet and as far as six from cyclists or pedestrians, depending on motor vehicle size.

The ordinance codifies the aforementioned right to a reasonable safety buffer. Like the police department’s stepped-up commitment to traffic enforcement, Leshin’s collaboration on the ordinance was God’s work that I appreciate on an intensely personal level.

One of my two car-on-bicycle encounters was a hit-and-run. It happened more than 20 years ago and police response at the time was neither satisfying nor Colombo-esque.

Unlike Leshin, who is looking at serious rehab, my injuries were so minor that I rode home. I was sideswiped by a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible — mocha brown with a black top; know of anyone who had one like that back then? — at the intersection of Santa Fe and Ayers Street. It was at night but I was illuminated with a headlight and back blinkers to such an over-extent that the sideswipe had to have been premeditated.

I took the impact from the driver’s side-view mirror and the car’s soft top. The driver actually cut inside me on the right, in the intersection, at what I estimated to be nearly 50 mph. The outcome would have been bad had the car been a hardtop and the mirror not collapsible. Lucky for me, the impact amounted to a punch from a good boxer in a bigger weight class, blocked with my shoulder and forearm — and a little bit of hip and thigh.

I had every expectation that the police could narrow the suspect list to the three or four cars in town that fit the description. “Thelma and Louise” was recent and I remembered how Harvey Keitel narrowed the list of rare T-Bird convertibles like the one Louise drove to a handful.

That was a movie, I was told. Yeah, a movie about a hayseed backwater cop who found Thelma and Louise’s car using the technological resources of the great state of Arkansas, I shot back. The reaction to that was indifference, not embarrassment.

To add insult, the same car — or, objectively, I should say a car fitting its rare description — passed me a few nights later on Santa Fe not far from the crime scene and someone inside said something to me that begins with the sixth letter of the alphabet. To add arrogance to the insult, this happened after publication of a column about the incident. Clearly the driver wasn’t concerned about being caught.

Here or in the afterlife, I and Karma will settle accounts with this person. Here, now, the Karma emanating from the police department toward cyclist and pedestrian safety is strong and positive. I hope Leshin feels it. He has contributed to it and deserves to be buoyed by it.